A Student-Directed Immersive Intelligent Tutoring System for Language Learning

摘要

A self-directed immersive Intelligent Tutoring System is proposed for language learning in pursuit of maximal motivation in students. In this self-directed learning paradigm, the student is given a full freedom in selecting her own courses of learning experience across events (or episodes) unless deviating from the overall pedagogical objective. This high student ownership of learning process is realized with a pedagogy of 'shepherding' students instead of didactic teaching or even facilitating. To accommodate an infinite array of immersive learning activities in spite of students' whimsical choice, a full-blown virtual world is required to provide a corresponding high play affordance. This virtual world is modeled in multitude of layers and dimensions, and is designed to unfold dynamically often coincidentally based on real-world rules often in the forms of emergent situations. These model and design together offer the diversity and realism of situations students can choose to engage themselves in or merely observe. The overall pedagogical objective against this full student autonomy is still fulfilled by separating the learning targets from the episodes and coupling dynamically in situation those targets with the chosen episodes. Beyond the conventional narrative coherency of each episode, a life-long coherency across learning sessions is maintained for each student via historically-contextualized consistent background world inhabited by her corresponding evolving agent.